"I see your point."
"Anyhow, we want to stay until we've gotten over the last hurdle."
Tex wandered on into the second room. "Hey, Oz-come look at this."
Matt and Oscar joined him. There were rows of little closets down each side, ten in all, each with its own curtain. "Oh, yes, our eating booths."
"That reminds me," said Matt. "I thought you had wrecked everything, Oz, when you started talking about eating. But you pulled out of it beautifully."
"I didn't pull out of it; I did it on purpose."
"Why?"
"It was a squeeze play. I had to shock them with the idea that they were indecent, or looked that way to us. It established us as 'people,' from their point of view. After that it was easy." Oscar went on. "Now that we are accepted as people, we've got to be awfully careful not to undo it. I don't like to eat in one of these dark little cubbyholes any better than you do, but we don't dare take a chance of being seen eating-you don't dare even fail to draw the curtain, as one of them might come popping in. Remember, eating is the only sort of privacy they observe."
"I get you," agreed Tex. "Pie with a fork."
"Huh?"
"Never mind-it's a painful memory. But Matt and I won"! slip."
XVI P.R.S. ASTARTE
OSCAB WAS SUMMONED again the next day into the presence of the city's chief magistrate and started laying the foundation, in a leisurely, indirect fashion, for formal diplomatic relations in the future. He began by getting her story of the trouble with the Gary and its skipper. It was much as Burke had admitted it to be, although from a different viewpoint.
Oscar had inquired casually as to why the swamp Burke wanted was tabu. He was worried that he might be invading religious matters but he felt that he needed to know it was a dead certainty that others would be along, in due course, to attempt to exploit the trans-uranic" ores; if the Patrol was to prevent further breaches of the peace the matter must be investigated.
The matriarch answered without hesitation; the swamp was tabu because the ore muds were poisonous.
Oscar felt the relief of a man who has just been told that it will not be necessary to lose a leg, after all. The ores were understandably poisonous; it was a matter that the Patrol could undoubtedly negotiate-conditional or practical tabus had been overcome many times with natives. He tabled the matter, as something to be taken up at a later time by the appropriate experts.
In a later interview he sounded her out on the. subject of the Patrol. She had heard of it, in a fashion, apparently - she used the native word given by the polar-region natives to all colonial government, a word meaning "guardians of the customs" or "keepers of the law."
The native meaning was quite useful to Oscar, for he found it impossible to get over to her the idea that the , Patrol was intended to prevent war-"war" was a concept she had never heard of!
But her conservative mind was naturally prejudiced in favor of any organization tagged as "guardians of the customs." Oscar approached it from that viewpoint. He explained to her that more of his own kind would be arriving; therefore the "great mother of many" of his own people had sent them as messengers to propose that a "mother" from Oscar's people be sent to aid her in avoiding friction.
She was receptive to the idea as it fitted her own experience and concepts. The groups of natives near the polar colonies were in the habit of handling their foreign affairs by exchanging "mothers"-actually judges-who ruled on matters arising out of differences in custom; Oscar had! presented the matter in the same terms. ^
He had thus laid the groundwork for a consulate, extraterritorial courts, and an Earthman police force; the mission, as he saw it, was complete- provided he could get back to base and report before other prospectors, mining engineers, and boomers of all sorts started showing up.
Only then had he spoken to her of getting back-to have her suggest that he remain permanently as "mother" for his people. (The root word translated as "mother" is used for every position of authority in the Venerian speech; the modifiers and the context give the word its current meaning-)
The proposal left Oscar temporarily speechless. "I didn't know what to say next," he confessed later. "From her point of view she was honoring me. If I turned it down, it might offend her and crab the whole deal." ';
"Well, how did you talk your way out of it?" Tex wanted j to know. "Or did you?" |
"I think so. I explained as diplomatically as possible that I was too young for the honor and that I was acting as 'mother only because Thurlow was laid up and that, in any case, my 'great mother of many had other work which I was obliged, by custom, to carry out."
"I guess that held her."
"I think she just filed it away as a point to negotiate. The Little People are great negotiators; you'll have to come to New Auckland some time and listen to the proceedings of a mixed court."
"Keep to the point," suggested Matt
"That is to the point-they don't fight; they just argue until somebody gives in. Anyhow, I told her that we had to get Thurlow back where he could get surgical attention. She understood that all right and expressed regret for the tenth time that her own little girls couldn't do the trick. But she had a suggestion for curing the boss."
"Yes?" demanded Matt. "What was it?" Matt had appointed himself Thurlow's caretaker, working with the amphibian healers who now had him as a professional responsibility. He had taught them to take his pulse and to watch his respiration; now there was always one of the gentle creatures x squatting on the end of Thurlow's couch, watching him with grave eyes. They seemed genuinely distressed at not being able to help him; the lieutenant had remained in a semi-coma, coming out of it enough occasionally that it had been possible to feed him and give him water, but never saying anything that the cadets could understand. Matt found that the little nurses were quite unsqueamish about feeding a helpless person; they accepted offensive necessities with the same gallantry as a human nurse.
But Thurlow, while he did not die, did not get any better.
"The old girl's suggestion was sort of radical, but logical. She suggested that her healers take Burke's head apart first, to see how it was made. Then they could operate on the boss and fix him."
"What?" said Matt.
Tex was having trouble controlling himself. He laughed so hard he strangled, then got hiccoughs and had to be pounded on the back. "Oh, boy!" he finally exploded, tears streaming down his cheeks, "this is wonderful. I can't wait to see Stinky's face. You haven't told him, have you?"
"No."
"Then let me. Dibs on the job."
"I don't think we ought to tell him," objected Oscar. "Why kick him when he's down?"
"Oh, don't be so noble! It won't hurt any to let him know that his social rating is 'guinea pig.' "
"She really hates him, doesn't she?" Matt commented.
"Why shouldn't she?" Tex answered. "A dozen or more of her people dead-do you expect her to regard it as a schoolboy prank?"
"You've both got her wrong," Oscar objected. "She doesn't hate him."
"Huh?"
"Could you hate a dog? Or a cat-"
"Sure could," said Tex. "There was an old tomcat we had once-"
"Pipe down and let me finish. Conceding your, point, you can hate, a cat only by placing it on your own social level. She doesn't regard Burke as ... well, as people at all, because he doesn't follow the customs. We're 'people* to her, because we do, even though we look like him. But Burke in her mind is just a dangerous animal, like a wolf or a shark, to be penned up or destroyed-but not hated or punished.
"Anyhow," he went on, "I told her it wouldn't do, because we had an esoteric and unexplainable but unbreakable religious tabu that interfered-that blocked her off from pressing the point. But I told her we'd like to use Burke's ship to get the lieutenant back. She gave it to me. We go out tomorrow to look at it."